Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Merchants

At Pinterest, we're on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love. We're looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to help drive the future of merchant presence and shopping experiences on Pinterest.

This role sits on the Merchant team and focuses on building AI/ML systems that identify, understand, and surface relevant, high-quality merchants across segments. You’ll lead LLM-first, evaluation-driven initiatives, focusing on agentic workflows, measurement, and operational rigor that strengthen Merchant Integrity and Business Integrity.

Responsibilities:

• Own end-to-end technical delivery for cross-team initiatives, from problem framing to rollout and iteration.
• Set technical direction and execution plans with a Director and cross-functional leads.
• Build and evolve ML and GenAI systems that improve merchant quality and understanding.
• Establish robust evaluation and measurement practices across ML + LLM-assisted systems.
• Design systems with strong attention to quality, cost, latency, reliability, and safety.
• Establish the ML engineering operating model for the org.
• Partner with cross-functional stakeholders to align on goals and rollout plans.
• Drive experimentation and iteration, lead error analysis, and translate learnings into measurable improvements.
• Mentor and raise the bar for technical design, evaluation rigor, and production readiness across the team.
• Help scale the domain by supporting hiring and onboarding over time.

Requirements:

• 8+ years of industry experience in ML engineering / applied ML / software engineering, including meaningful time operating as a Staff-level (or equivalent) IC delivering complex production systems.
• Demonstrated ability to lead 0→1 ML/LLM efforts and deliver a production system with measurable impact.
• Strong track record shipping ML-powered systems in domains such as recommendation, ranking, retrieval, content understanding, ads relevance, commerce, or adjacent areas.
• Hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications in production.
• Deep experience with evaluation and measurement.
• Strong systems design skills building data- and ML-intensive systems.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to influence technical direction across teams.
• Demonstrated experience building and enhancing cross-functional partnerships with other teams and organizations.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field,or equivalent practical experience.

The base salary range for this position is $213,180-$314,160 CAD.